Given the dispute over the genre of Genesis 1–11, this paper first overviews the dispute historically, focuses
on the role that the description of Eden has played in the
dispute, assesses a representative evangelical scholar’s
indeterminacy, and then offers a potential solution based
on the deixis of place names which supports the historicity
of Genesis 1–11.
1

The usual considerations in this debate are therelationship between Genesis and historical events, andthe relationship between Genesis and other Ancient NearEastern texts. Classical readings such as Augustine andOrigen have tended towards reading Genesis as an allegorybut usually based on an underlying presupposition that theauthorial intention was to write historically first of all.
2Thomas Aquinas, for example,“... insisted on the primacy of the literal and heldthat it was sufficient for doing theology. He affirmeda literal garden of Eden … declaring that ‘the thingswhich are said of Paradise in scripture are set forth bymeans of an historical narrative. Now in everythingwhich scripture thus sets forth, the truth (of the story)must be taken as a foundation and upon it spiritualexpositions are to be built.’”
3

There is a well-worn debate over the extent of linguistic
and structural dependency between Genesis 1 and the other
ANE cosmological texts.
4 The debate centres over whether we
should view Genesis 1 as a polemic against other cosmologies
of the sort found in Mesopotamia.
5 The argument turns on
the relationship of certain key words such as tehom and
tohu vabohu being connected in some way to mythological
conflict. Tehom, the deep, is read as a demythologized water
goddess, Tiamat in Enuma Elish, and tohu vabohu, which
the NIV translates as ‘formless and empty’, is understood
as some kind of malevolent chaotic force that God has to
overcome in order to create the universe. For many readers
of Genesis, then, these words are codes for a conflict that
has been deliberately removed or suppressed by the author in
order to turn Genesis 1 into a polemic against the equivalent
ANE worldview which still has a cosmic battle at the heart
of their creation narrative.

I have followed David Tsumura’s arguments against such
linguistic dependency and argued that to read conflict into
Genesis 1 (or even to believe that it has been removed from
the text) is to read against the grain.
6 Kenneth Matthews’
Genesis commentary takes a similarly nuanced approach
to the idea of polemic as a description of the genre of
Genesis. Rather than seeing the texts as a historicization
of myth for polemic reasons, he thinks it “doubtful that the
biblical writer intentionally set out to attack pagan notions,
as the word ‘polemic’ has come to mean.”
7 Instead, the
text of Genesis 1 should be read as a calm series of highly
structured, if somewhat enigmatic, statements.

If we extend our discussion to the first 11 chapters of
Genesis, we note that many accept some correspondence
between the biblical record and history and consider it to be
part of the authorial intention, whilst others deny this as a
possible category at all. Walter Brueggemann, for instance,
writes, “[o]ur exposition will insist that these texts be taken
neither as history nor as myth.”
8 A similar view is taken by
George Knight in his commentary on Genesis 1–11. He sees
the genre as being picture language, a genre that the author
both invented and perfected in these chapters. “Thus in the
Genesis Prologue he uses a distinctly different Gattung from
that which he employs from Genesis 12 onwards.”
9 Bernhard
Anderson also believes the genre of Genesis changes after
Genesis 11.

“Passing from Genesis 11 to Genesis 12, we leave
the nebulous realm of primeval history and enter
the historical arena of the second millennium BCE
… [N]one of the episodes of the primeval history is
anchored to anything with which a modern historian
could deal.”
10

However, the historical sceptic Hans Barstad makes the
point that this distinction is a modern category, one that would
not have been recognized by the initial readers of Genesis.
He writes: “To the biblical authors there was no difference
between the ‘historicity’ of, for instance, the Primeval Story
and that of other stories in the Hebrew Bible.”
11

Reading ‘places’ in Genesis 1–11Alistair McKitterick

The debate about Genesis’s genre is influenced by the perceived historicity of Eden in Genesis 2. A method for examining
the genre of the early chapters of Genesis is to identify the relative frequency of deixis indicators, in particular the author’s
use of places. The distribution and type of place references suggests that the author intended an historical genre for
Genesis 1–11, but that there is a discontinuity between old and new worlds as a result of the Flood. The use of place
names associated with Eden is thought to be for etiological purposes.